The "extinction burst"

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Interesting term, interesting idea, from David McRaney, proprietor of the blog You Are Not So Smart, which I came across yesterday. 

The concept is an echo, if not an analog, of Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," applied to bad eating habits. 

You’ve been there.

You get serious about losing weight and start to watch every calorie. You read labels, stock up on fruit and vegetables, hit the gym.

Everything is going fine. You feel great. You feel like a champion. You think, “This is easy.”

One day you give in to temptation and eat some candy, or a doughnut, or a cheeseburger. Maybe, you buy a bag of chips. You order the fettuccine alfredo.

That afternoon, you decide not only will you eat whatever you want, but to celebrate the occasion you will eat a pint of ice cream.

The diet ends in a catastrophic binge.

What the hell? How did your smooth transition from comfort food to human Dumpster happen?

You just experienced an extinction burst.

For McRaney, the topic is eating, and he even deploys what for me are the key phrases — "Compulsive overeating is a frenzied state of mind, food addiction under pressure until it bursts" — in the same sentence. But his context is conditioning, a la B.F. Skinner, rather than an understanding of food addiction as I know it. The divergence becomes clear in his solution:

 

Become your own Supernanny, your own Dog Whisperer. Look for alternative rewards and positive reinforcement. Set goals, and when you achieve them, shower yourself with garlands of your choosing.

 

Those suggestions are good, I imagine, for the vast majority of people who are heavier than they would like. But they didn't work for me, and I don't think they are going to work for food addicts.

If we could just get cleverer about the problem, or come up with the right rewards, that would be one thing. But cleverness was not at issue in my eating — I was (am) quite clever (IMHO) — but I still got to be 365 pounds. I never did much with the rewards thing, but other people tried to do them for me and they just didn't stick.

I was eating over emotions, the empty hole inside. I was trying to get from food what I wasn't getting from other parts of my life — fulfillment, friendship, fellowship. And food doesn't have that to give. For me, it just temporarily dulled the lack, just as alcohol and drugs do for other people. Actually, those things did that for me, too, but always temporarily and never as appealingly, to me, as food. I was one of the few cocaine abusers who gained weight!

For me, it was surrender to other powers, including a higher power, that gave me my only lasting results — results which are now consistent now for almost two decades. It was following the examples of other people whose stories sounded like mine and whose bodies and demeanors suggested to me that I should follow their examples. It was acknowledging that I wasn't fixing myself, no matter how many times I tried.

I'm not sure if McRaney would find my ideas in conflict, or just supplemental, to his. But I am sure about my experience, and its implications for other potential food addicts.

PS I love the blog name! He is so right — I am not so smart, especially around my eating, where my smarts have had their limits shown again and again. As I've said often, I'm wicked smaht, and a wicked slow learner when it comes to my addiction.


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